writing groups

I’m past the midway point of National Novel Writing Month, and wouldn’t be here without my community of writers. In my fortunate case, it’s fellow members of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and the subset of those who are doing the wild writing marathon of #NaNoWriMo, wherein you write 50,000 words of a new novel in 30 days. Crazy, huh? Yet more than 300,000 people every year are now participating. How many get to the end with 50K words? I’m willing to bet a large percentage are writers working in some kind of community. For mutual support and encoureagement along the lonely writing path, there’s nothing like a #NaNoWriMo group.

Joining a writing group means opening up about your process, and for introverted writer types, that can be scary. My impression was that writers were all competing with each other, so when I first joined WFWA, saying anything on any topic felt fraught with the risk of humiliating myself. I felt these were all such accomplished, published novelists (at the time I wasn’t published), and how dare I comment or even broach a subject.